Training OK Google with PP (Prashnabodhak Punji)

Artist:

Abhishek Hazra

Location:

Bangalore, India

Full Category:

Consumer Electronics > Home Surveillance > Surveillance Accessories

Starting Price:

$100.00

Sale Price:

Unsold

Artist Bio:

Abhishek Hazra’s works traverse a diverse, yet closely interconnected mesh of interests. He uses video and performance with textual fragments drawn from real and fictional scenarios. Histories of science and an ironic fascination with theoretical approaches are some of the interests that inform his practice. He has exhibited and performed widely in various contexts that include Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, Kunstmuseum Bern, Bose Pacia, New York, MAXXI Museum, Rome, GallerySKE, Bangalore, KHOJ, New Delhi. He has participated in various artist residences including Gasworks and SymbioticA. Abhishek has also received multiple awards including the 2011 Sanskriti Award for Visual Art.

Curator:

Ghidini & Modrak

Artist Statement:

Today, even as the acceleration of information pushes us to our cognitive threshold, our images, texts, sounds and videos continue to acquire an exponentially bigger audience. However, a significant portion of this growing audience is non-human, comprised as they are of machine vision and hearing. Who are these machinic strangers who know us so intimately and what would it be to create artworks for them? If we could hold an intelligent conversation with them on political economy, will it be easier for us to consider them as agents of aesthetic contemplation? But even if these software assemblages did possess such agency, wouldn’t it be ill-advised to forget that the contestation of power plays out on the terrain of politics and not on the slippery slope of technological ‘solutions’?

These are some of the larger questions, that inform this work. The work itself is framed under the guise of training OK Google’s voice recognition and artificial intelligence capabilities with human voice fragments that encapsulate cognitive challenges from Karl Marx’s Capital. OK Google is the software behemoth’s voice based digital personal assistant that signal a turn towards oral-aural digital interaction – the much hyped emergence of the so-called conversational UI (user interface).

This work is also a continuation of an earlier work (http://ow.ly/z9WI307wtAm) that was done for an earlier exhibition using online commerce (ebayaday) around 10 years back.